At the end of last year, my family and I played and completed the board game, Pandemic Legacy. It’s a co-operative game, where you work with the other players to save the world from, well, you guessed it, a global pandemic.
If a normal board game is like a movie—where it’s over in a couple hours—Pandemic Legacy is like a TV series, where each game is part of a broader story and builds on the previous games.
It was, hands down, the best board game I’ve ever played. And we often discussed—over the 16 games we played—what would happen if a real pandemic hit the globe. Little did we know…
Us humans are good at finding the humour in tough situations, though. Humour helps us cope with, reflect upon, make sense of, and lighten the circumstances.
Over the past few months, our family has made jokes about how it’s a good thing we’re not responsible for the world’s COVID response—often poking fun at someone who made a particularly bad board game decision.
We also jokingly wonder if 2020 have been different if we hadn’t played the game? As if us playing had some Jumanji-esque impact on the world.
Of course, none of this is true, but the humour is a welcome break from the talk of lockdowns and vaccines.
Humour is a tonic.